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I actually have this book but haven't read it yet. As someone who joined the web startup world when I was 14 and never went back to school, I need to work on my

by blixt 12y ago

I actually have this book but haven't read it yet. As someone who joined the web startup world when I was 14 and never went back to school, I need to work on my math skills. I believe strongly in building knowledge by layers (start with a simple overview, work you way towards the core of the subject) rather than going in for the detail right away. Would you say this book does the former well and just doesn't cover the details very well, or is the book somehow flawed?

mirashii 12y ago
I think it's one thing to say "Where and how you can apply these we can discuss in more detail later, but for now assume that you can do x, y, and z only" and another to omit details altogether to later correct (if corrected at all) or leave what's available to inference. From my reading and skimming of the samples provided, I wouldn't call this book a "simple overview" as I would call it something that's so concerned with getting to what appears to be the result/goal of a class like high school physics, but misses the real point. For instance, the purpose of a high school class many might take to be to learn how to take derivatives and integrals and apply them to a few common types of problems. After all, that's what you spend your time building up to, and what final exams on the class cover, so that's the point, right? But to the contrary, the skills and problem solving you get from doing those things in more rigor, with the details fully fleshed out instead of glossed over, and with motivation properly explained, is the real purpose. In short, what I think this book will do is teach to the test, where the test is a template final exam from the type of course it purports to cover. But as we are all well aware, exams are not always proxies for whether you learned the whole of the material. Based on the depth of information provided, I'd say if your goal was to pass that class for your GED and never touch the information again and never try to apply it outside of the small template given by the textbooks, maybe it's useful. If you want practical knowledge that you can apply in a variety of situations and use to continue your education past this point, you're going to be missing a lot of very important details.
- ivan_ah 12y ago
  Thanks for reviewing the book. It's interesting that you came away with conclusion that I aim to teach-to-the-test, which is in fact diametrically opposite to my intent. My main purpose with this book is to communicate to students the power of using mathematics to model the real world. For this reason I made a great effort to show the connections between the tools of calculus and the different modelling techniques in physics. E.g. I make sure this reasoning is understood: (sum F)/m = a => integrate_t + v_0 => integrate_t + x_0 = x(t) by covering it in Chapter 2, Chapter 4, and again in Chapter 5. True there are some sections that are written more in a you-need-to-know-this-because-its-going-to-be-on-the-exam (e.g. integration techniques, and series convergence tests), but that's just the nature of these topics.

by blixt 12y ago

mirashii 12y ago

I think it's one thing to say "Where and how you can apply these we can discuss in more detail later, but for now assume that you can do x, y, and z only" and another to omit details altogether to later correct (if corrected at all) or leave what's available to inference. From my reading and skimming of the samples provided, I wouldn't call this book a "simple overview" as I would call it something that's so concerned with getting to what appears to be the result/goal of a class like high school physics, but misses the real point. For instance, the purpose of a high school class many might take to be to learn how to take derivatives and integrals and apply them to a few common types of problems. After all, that's what you spend your time building up to, and what final exams on the class cover, so that's the point, right? But to the contrary, the skills and problem solving you get from doing those things in more rigor, with the details fully fleshed out instead of glossed over, and with motivation properly explained, is the real purpose. In short, what I think this book will do is teach to the test, where the test is a template final exam from the type of course it purports to cover. But as we are all well aware, exams are not always proxies for whether you learned the whole of the material. Based on the depth of information provided, I'd say if your goal was to pass that class for your GED and never touch the information again and never try to apply it outside of the small template given by the textbooks, maybe it's useful. If you want practical knowledge that you can apply in a variety of situations and use to continue your education past this point, you're going to be missing a lot of very important details.

ivan_ah 12y ago
Thanks for reviewing the book. It's interesting that you came away with conclusion that I aim to teach-to-the-test, which is in fact diametrically opposite to my intent. My main purpose with this book is to communicate to students the power of using mathematics to model the real world. For this reason I made a great effort to show the connections between the tools of calculus and the different modelling techniques in physics. E.g. I make sure this reasoning is understood: (sum F)/m = a => integrate_t + v_0 => integrate_t + x_0 = x(t) by covering it in Chapter 2, Chapter 4, and again in Chapter 5. True there are some sections that are written more in a you-need-to-know-this-because-its-going-to-be-on-the-exam (e.g. integration techniques, and series convergence tests), but that's just the nature of these topics.